Geoffrey of Wells
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Geoffrey of Wells (Galfridius Fontibus[1]) was a mid-twelfth-century English hagiographer, doubtless formerly a canon of Wells Cathedral, whose De Infantia Sancti Edmundi ("The infancy of Saint Edmund"),[2] part of the burgeoning library of twelfth-century legendaries concerning Saint Edmund[3] accounted the royal saint's childhood to have been full of adventure;[4] he dedicated his "largely spurious account"[5] to Ording, eighth abbot of Bury St. Edmunds,[6] and spoke of the encouragement of another well-placed Anglo-Saxon, Prior Sihtric. The manuscript of Geoffrey's pious embroidery was among the manuscripts collected by the early seventeenth-century antiquary Robert Bruce Cotton, now conserved in the British Library.[7]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Another Galfridus Fontibus was Geoffrey of Fontaines-les-Blanches: see Giles Constable, "Religious communities, 1024-1215", in David Luscombe (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge University Press) 2004:364.
- ^ Geoffrey of Wells, Liber de infantia Sancti Eadmundi, R.M. Thomson, editor, Analecta Bollandiana 95 (1977:34-42).
- ^ Gábor Klaniczay, (Eva Pálmai, translater), Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe (Cambridge University Press) 2002:162; "The history of the legend of Saint Edmund"
- ^ For parallel apocryphal literature, see Infancy gospels.
- ^ Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity (Oxford University Press) 2000:132.
- ^ Abbots of Bury St. Edmunds
- ^ British Library, Cotton Titus A. viii, part II, BL2393
